Food cooking and eating – stories and ideas from a passionate foodie

Archive for December, 2014

We had the third day of our chicken last night. Chicken and Mushroom risotto.

It made me think about a few things:

Chicken is very versatile.

It may be the most suitable roasting dish to be utilizable (a new word??) for ‘intended left-overs’

Even with ostensibly similar ingredients, a dish can ‘sing’ louder sometimes, and sometimes it’s just OK

This happens with my Bolognese sauce every time we make it. It doesn’t have that many ingredients (onions, minced beef, mushrooms, tinned tomatoes, mixed dried herbs, a clove of garlic, crushed, some fresh Basil and salt /pepper), but it is always slightly different.

Can it be the ingredients, or just how we cook it? Fascinating stuff! (Look, I am a scientist, just bear with!!)

Tiny pieces – makes a different result??

Onions cooked more slowly? May get more caramelised? Older onions – are already more sugary, as they attempt to grow…isn’t nature wonderful? Slightly bigger onion – well, it will be more oniony! Chapped finer? Will brown more quickly, and maybe release more moisture?And that is just the onions!!

If I’m boiling up the chicken I always go to our butcher, where a good medium sized chicken will set you back £7 or so. Tiny price per portion – this one has made 8 meals and two snacks for us – 80p a go…not bad!

Why was this risotto different? Well I had made a lot of gravy for day 1 and day 2 roasts. And added the chicken feet plus the lemon that had cooked inside the chicken into the gravy too – and boiled it for ages. Maybe it’s the very good inseason mushrooms – they smelt rather fine – field mushrooms – made the risotto quite dark…. Maybe adding a teaspoon of lemon?

I don’t know – whatever it was, it was, it was quite spectacular. If only we knew, we could repeat it!